Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  I had actually expected to be assailed by intense despair, mixed with impotent fury about my scattiness. And that that would stop over the next few days of waiting for a package from Lufthansa. (It was a very good thing, by the way, that you addressed the subject of postal duration, I immediately thought of it and cautioned myself.) But it was quite different, and even now I don’t know whether I should think of it as better or worse than the natural reaction. As soon as I had sat down to rest, without really noticing I slipped into a state of apathy. I was glad of the inner quiet that that involved, because I had feared the agitation, the sleeplessness and everything bound up with it. But soon it became clear to me that I had, quite automatically, let myself fall back into the state into which I had settled in prison – a state of dull endurance, of wordless resignation, which, as you soon learn there, saves your strength. And I’m very shocked by that, because I had thought that that experience was a thing of the past.

  I wasn’t able to free myself from my apathy over the days that followed, and perhaps I didn’t want to, even though the state seemed dangerous to me, because there was also something increasingly self-destructive about it. For example, I started to wonder whether there might be deeper reasons for my oversight: that I didn’t actually want the post, or that I was trying to distance myself from the content of the text. My uncertainty became so great that I couldn’t tell Larissa anything about it, even though she sensed on the telephone that something wasn’t quite right with me.

  Every day I went into the institute and waited for the post. And when nothing came, I didn’t know how I would get through the next twenty-four hours. It was impossible to start a letter. It was impossible to start anything, in fact. I spent a lot of time standing on the banks of the Neva. The apathy I’m talking about: it’s shot through with grey, waiting for everything to pass without the slightest idea of what should be good about its passing. Part of this is the – how can I put it – mild desire to end it all. I hadn’t felt that desire for a long time, quite the contrary, now it made its presence felt again and merged with the suddenly resurfacing grief over Mother’s death. Where that would have led if the text hadn’t reappeared, I don’t know.

  Of course, I wondered whether I shouldn’t at least present the first version under these circumstances. But after a few attempted readings I rejected the idea. The text is simply too feeble, and so confused as to be repellent to me. How is one supposed to present a text that is far below the level one has attained on the subject in the meantime? It’s an emotional impossibility. Sooner no text at all!

  On Wednesday, when still nothing had come, I summoned all my courage, sat down and tried to reconstruct everything from memory. I felt a bit as I had in Santa Margherita when I was preparing myself for my session. I must have spent close to twenty hours sitting tight at my desk, and there was so much smoke in the apartment afterwards that it was too much even for me. Then I gave up, and when I crept half-dead from my bed on Thursday I had buried all hope of the post and started looking around for part-time work. (You do it even if it seems pointless.)

  For that reason I called in at the institute again on Friday, since I was in the area anyway. From the way the conversations fell silent as I appeared, I had to conclude that my never-arriving package had already become a talking point. Vassily Sergeevich’s imaginary package! And then it happened: as I got home from the institute, having abandoned all hope, there was the envelope just lying by the front door! Just imagine all the things that could have happened! I concluded from a long way off that it must be my text (quite apart from wishful thinking) from the two yellow stickers, because the Lufthansa address labels that I saw on items of luggage on my journey were the same color. And then I also saw the red express delivery label that looks different to the ones we have here. As I ran the last few meters I nearly fell on the ice, and I opened the envelope while I was still on the doorstep.

  The envelope itself was nothing special (not to be compared to the one you had with you that time in the café!), but just imagine: Lufthansa had taken the trouble to put the text in a plastic jacket! When I thought about it later, that struck me as slightly grotesque, as the jacket couldn’t be closed because of a defective zip, so that some feared moisture (if that was what it was for – but what else, if not?) had seeped into the paper anyway. But for the first moment I was quite astonished. Such care. ‘German thoroughness’, I thought at first; but then I remembered the sour face you pulled when Brian used that cliché.

  The state of the text was a shock. As if it had been in a ditch for days! First of all, most of the pages were dirty, in places to the point of illegibility. Others are torn, and the first page has a hole in it as if it’s been shot. But that was all fine. What left me completely paralyzed for a while was the discovery that seventeen pages were missing! Seventeen pages! And the last eight, of all things, the ones in which I show what appropriation can mean in my conception of narrating, inventing memory! At first I thought: I’ll never do that in a week. And again I felt that apathy that had all at once dissolved to nothing at the sight of the yellow stickers. But then my memory came into play. I realized that much that was lost was coming back to me, and then I pulled myself together and went to my desk.

  You will probably think this mad, but I couldn’t really start work before I had found an explanation for the state of the pages. And that wasn’t easy.

  The package had been dispatched from Frankfurt. So I had left the text in the waiting room when changing planes. (Not on the plane – you know my theory about cleaning crews.) Even now I can’t remember taking it out. (Or rather the opposite: I have remembered in the meantime that, hidden by a newspaper that someone had left behind, I spent ages staring at a fantastic-looking woman two rows ahead of me.) But it must simply have been the case. But where did the dirt come from, and the blisters in the paper that seemed to have been caused by water? Only that night in bed did it occur to me: at some point – by being touched by a coat, or a child – the pages fell on the floor; there are lots of things on the floor in waiting rooms like that at the end of the day. I have never seen such a machine myself, but there must be huge vacuum cleaners or at any rate automatic cleaning machines that tidy the place up. And then it’s quite clear: the pages must have ended up in a thing like that. That would explain the dirt and the tears, and since you can’t clean without water, the blisters and waves in the paper can’t come as a surprise.

  That no one noticed the many yellow sheets of paper: somehow I imagine two chatting cleaning women, heedlessly running the vacuum cleaner tube along the floor. Then, when the dirt-container is being emptied, they discover the paper. Seventeen pages have been hopelessly destroyed; all you can do is shrug. The rest they pass on to the lost and found, if there is such a thing. You see: this one cleaning crew is the exception to my theory. As befits a deus ex machina!

  It was an unsettled night, because every time I was about to fall asleep, another mystery occurred to me. One hard nut was the business with the address. I can’t remember if I told you: I always write the address on the last page. But it was missing! I got as excited as if it were a chess puzzle. In the end I had three hypotheses, which I can’t choose between even today: either the last sheet was so badly damaged that they just copied out the address and then threw it away; or else the person who prepared the envelope kept the last page out to copy down the address and then forgot to put it in the envelope (perhaps he was distracted by something); or finally, as I often use old envelopes as notepaper, an envelope with my address on it had slipped between the pages. That was where they got the address from, not my text.

  I got up again and looked at the postmark once more: why had it taken Lufthansa a whole week to send the package? For a while I was furious with those people: how much they could have spared me if they had been a little faster! But then my gratitude prevailed, particularly when I became aware that the address was in Russian on the text. They must have fetched someone specially who could read Russian, an
d handwritten Russian at that! All right, then, I thought, Lufthansa is Lufthansa. In the meantime, I’ve written a thank you letter, and I will also provide a recommendation. (As if Lufthansa needed my recommendations!)

  The last incongruity occurred to me only the next morning when I was shaving: how did Lufthansa know my home address, when it was my work address that was on the text? No one in Germany knows where I live. (Apart from you, of course.) That ran through my head again and again over the course of the day, and struck me as the one insoluble mystery. Of course, there’s the possibility of an envelope with the home address on it. But there’s something artificial about that (another deus ex machina!). And besides, wouldn’t they have sent that portentous envelope as well? That’s what I would have done. An open envelope in someone’s hands doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is also the addressee. And if someone receives a nameless text, he’s more likely to make sense of things if an envelope addressed to him arrives with it, than if there are no clues at all. (If he hasn’t just fished it out of a waste-paper basket, the current owner of the envelope will be one of the acquaintances of the addressee, and the author of the text will eventually be found among them.)

  Whatever. The more natural story, I finally and reluctantly admitted, is that I didn’t write my work address on it at all: if my memory deceives me over the question of whether I took the text out of my case – why couldn’t it deceive me here, too? Contrary to my usual habit, I wrote my private address on it, simple as that. It unsettles me to find that I plainly can’t rely on my memory. That used not to be the case. An experience which, of course, fits Gorky’s subject and my thesis (even though that connection, as you know, is more complicated than it might superficially appear). If the experience were not so awkward . . .

  In spite of all these explanations: a hint of strangeness, of mystery, still remains. As if a drama had been played out around this text, of which its actors have no notion . . . If that had happened to Gorky – he would have made something of it!

  What happened outside the world during the six days that followed – I haven’t the faintest idea. I can’t even remember the weather. I was typing things out, filling gaps, going on typing, reconstructing the next missing thought, and so on. As long as I hadn’t finished the day’s workload, I simply didn’t stop, regardless of how late it was getting and how much my back hurt. The tension was so great that I even brought myself to ask a hated neighbor to do some food shopping for me. (She couldn’t believe her ears. Since then our relationship has been excellent!)

  Between Wednesday night and Friday morning I rewrote the lost conclusion. The text isn’t nearly as good as the original one. In fact, it’s even rather shoddy. Somehow I was so exhausted that I couldn’t really keep my thoughts together. And temporarily I felt as if my earlier impression of having found a coherent solution for the problem of appropriation was pure delusion, a Fata Morgana. I didn’t go to bed. I just dozed for half an hour on the sofa every now and again. I think there are a few typing errors. But shortly after eight on Friday morning the thing was finished.

  I walked slowly through a thick, fairy-tale snowstorm to the institute, and made several copies there. I savored the moment when I laid the manuscript on the table in front of the Chair of the Commission. He had given up expecting it, and you could see that he was distressed. I could swear that he had already made promises to someone else (I don’t know to whom) which he would now have to revoke. I think he really hated me at that moment.

  All that weekend I just slept, ate, slept. The Commission’s meeting, I discovered later, was that Monday morning, and the decision was to be made at around midday: they simply couldn’t do anything other than give me the post. (Of course, in that short time no one had read the text. Once again they were concerned only with externals such as length.) But they kept me waiting. No one informed me. Then, when I called on them yesterday, I was informed of the result in an insultingly casual manner. And I also discovered that the conditions for the post are worse than expected. Still, though, it’s a permanent post, so I can breathe for the first time. I would have liked to celebrate with someone: but the only possible person would have been Yuri (the one with the fifty dollars) and he wasn’t there. I tried to call you, but those endlessly engaged phone lines are hopeless, so I started this letter, which I had to interrupt because my exhaustion caught up with me.

  I think a lot about that wonderful week with you all. I will send you a copy of the text under separate cover. (You will probably be annoyed if I say this, but still: I don’t think it will be too difficult for you.) I would really like to send all the other colleagues a copy – so that they can see that this portentous text really exists! Because it’s a nightmare typical of our profession: being invited to give a lecture somewhere – and you have no text! How easy it is to feel that the others think you’re a fraud! But perhaps it will end up being translated and published. Can you envisage that any more clearly now?

  I hope to hear from you soon. You struck us all as seriously exhausted, and I hope you will soon recover. I felt that you didn’t want us to mention Agnes, so I just want to assure you that there was a lot of sympathy for your difficult situation in the group.

  And let me add one thing in conclusion: even when you were here, I had the feeling I had a friend in you. After my week with you I am now sure of it. You showed an interest in my work that no one has ever shown before. And the way you were interested in Klim Samgin showed me that we have much else in common. I don’t need to stress how much I look forward to seeing you again soon.

  Do svidaniya. Yours Vassily

  That last paragraph brought tears to Perlmann’s eyes once more. But now they were no longer tears of relief, but of shame, and he hid his face in the cushion. When he went to the bathroom afterwards, to wash his tear-drenched face, he felt a weight lifting from him, one so powerful that he had had to turn his emotions away from it all the time, to be able to bear it at all. He lay down, exhausted, on the sofa, and after a while he read the letter again.

  The worst passages, he found, were the ones about the prison and the parenthetical remark about Perlmann’s knowledge of his private address. Then came the passage about the drama and the unknown actors, and it was also unbearable that Leskov, because he had no one to celebrate with, had tried to call him – him, of all people, when he had been a hair’s breadth away from murdering him. Only in the course of the day did Perlmann manage to smile about one passage or an other, which he read several times, and it was always an endangered smile that didn’t dare to go too far for fear of subsiding into tears once more. When evening began to fall, he went to the piano and played the Nocturne in D flat major. Blind with tears, he kept hitting wrong notes.

  62

  In mid-December Perlmann went to Hamburg to see Hanna Liebig. Her golden hair had developed a silvery sheen, and under the dark strand that she combed emphatically over her forehead there was a long scar, which, as she said with embarrassment, was the result of a car accident. She was still energetic. But there was, he thought, something washed-out and disappointed in her face. He liked her apartment, but an overly ornate clock and some ceramic knick-knacks bothered him, because they struck him as whimsical – as if they were signs that Hanna’s finely honed sense of elegant design was deserting her.

  Over dinner he told her about the research group, about Millar and their rivalry. He also mentioned that he had played the A flat minor Polonaise. Afterwards she had some idea of why he had phoned her. But without the tunnel, the fear and the despair the whole thing sounded hollow and childish. When she ran her hand playfully over his hair on the way to the kitchen, as she had done in the past, he was about to start over from the beginning and tell her the whole story. But something in her face, something new that he couldn’t have described, seemed strange to him, and then the feeling was over. They talked again for a while about Liszt, but it was mere shop talk, which soon bored him, because it had no connection with Millar and the ochre-colored
armchairs in the lounge. Afterwards in the street he reflected that they had been closer to one another recently on the phone than during the whole of their meeting that evening.

  They had arranged to meet for lunch the following day. Perlmann didn’t go. As he heard her playing through a run and explaining something, he slipped a note under the door of her apartment and then took the bus to the Conservatoire. The sound of Mozart came from the room where he had always practiced in the past. After a while he opened the door a crack. At the piano sat a man with curly hair and an oriental face, playing with unimaginable lightness. The room had different wallpaper now, and the painting by Klee was no longer on the wall. He carefully closed the door. He had planned to seek out the street where he had grown up. But when he saw the black iron fences in his mind’s eye, and felt his arm hopping from one fence post to the next, he abandoned the plan and took the next train to Frankfurt.

  In his mailbox there was a message from the post office about a package. He could see straight away that it was from Leskov, when the clerk took it from the shelf the following morning. He wished it hadn’t come, whatever it might contain. Leskov’s letter was what he had needed, and he had had to endure it. He had found its thoroughness oppressive, but it was hard to admit this to himself. It had been the most extreme thing he could bear, and it was the last he wanted to hear from Vassily Leskov. Fine, he would have to give him some kind of reply. But that could be done in a conventional tone. There were moods in which Perlmann scribbled down such things without any inner involvement. And then he never wanted to hear from Leskov again. Never again.